By Dr. Kit Baston
The Signet Library has completed a project to catalogue the rare works of William Mitchel, the Tincklarian Doctor, an eccentric Edinburgh character of the early-eighteenth century. A tinker by trade, Mitchel had a sideline in writing cheap pamphlets that he sold at his shop in the West Bow. Writing of William Mitchel’s output in the 1920s, his biographer William Roughead found that its
‘..Testaments, Sermons, Letters, Speeches, Petitions, Discourses, Prophecies, Histories, Epistles, Catechisms, Elegies, and Verses – are sufficiently bewildering’ with ‘subject matter [that] defies classification’.[1]
Roughead was hooked: it is in part because he collected Mitchel’s pamphlets so keenly that the Signet Library has one of the best collections of the Tincklarian Doctor’s works anywhere in the world. One volume that Roughead bought contains an inscription showing that at least one of the pamphlets in it was purchased from Mitchel himself at his shop in 1736.
The layouts and paper quality are poor, but the pamphlets posses a rare charm and strange appeal. Who could resist a title like:
Good news, aho! Great news, aho! A new light come to Scotland, herein I shew the marks of them who must go to Hell, with a true Description of those Wthat [sic] worship the Beast, and receive his Mark in their Foreheads and Hands, as I shall prove the most Part of the Presbyterian Ministers of Scotland have done, as is also made plain both on their Foreheads and Hands, by swearing these unlawful Oaths, and by making these unlawful Acts. I am also to shew you how their Hearers are deceived, with the Reason of it. Which is the Tinclarian Doctor’s seventh epistle. Written in the 63d year of his age. 1733.
Or
A wonderful deep Sermon, preached upon the deepest Text that ever was preached upon since the Foundation of the World, By the Tinclarian Doctor, From his own Pulpit, in the West-bow. This Sermon was printed in the Sixty Fourth Year of his Age, 1734.
Mitchel was born in 1670 and lived to 1740. He combined his trade with street preaching and travelling to ‘give light’ where it was needed. He married twice – his wives can be described as ‘long-suffering’— one of his sermons was on the subject, ‘Women who are possest with an ill Spirit’,[2] and had several children.
One of Mitchel’s recurring themes over more than fifty pamphlets over two decades was his criticism of religious systems and officials, including the ministers of the Church of Scotland, Scottish and English bishops, Lutherans, and, especially, the Catholic church. Mitchel’s ‘Epistles’, ‘Catechisms’, and ‘Wonderful Sermons’ revelled in his perception of his superiority in religious thinking and theological knowledge.
Alongside Michel’s turn for prophecy and theology, we find his adventures in Edinburgh and Glasgow as he names and shames those who have done him wrong. In Edinburgh, he finds injustice when a rich man blocks his shop door with a cairn of stones, ‘which takes away my light’.[3] Light was important for the sometime official lamplighter of Edinburgh whose pamphlets were often embellished with his motto, ‘I give light’, making the act cruel as well as careless. On another run-in with officialdom, Mitchel was forced to remove a table that he had outside his shop to display his wares. He observed that ‘the Government of Edinburgh is as the Government of the Fish in the Sea: the great Lives upon the small’.[4] Glasgow was worse. After a friendly welcome there after he fled from the oppression of Edinburgh, he declared, ‘They are not the People I took them to be’. His writings were considered blasphemous and
…some of them Stole my made Work, and some of them Robed me of it; some of them Stole my Lantron Horns, and some of them Robed me of all my Brandy, and some of them Stole my Cloathes, and some of them Stole all the Money I had in the World. I Wrot to their Praise, indeed, but I was wrong informed….I thought they were a wise kind of People; but after I tryed them and examined them, I found it contrary to what I wrote to their Praise.[5]
Mitchel also travelled to England and France where he observed society in his imitable style. The English he found ‘fat… worldly-wise men and their Belly is their God. They take no Delight in Divine Books [those written by the Tinclarian Doctor]. They have much talk, which is the Mark of a Fool’.[6] The French were worse with the ‘English…much sharper in their Wits than the People of France. The People of France is a dull Kind of People: when I gave them my Money to change they could hardly count it’. Paris was ‘round like Leith, but clean Streets; they sweep them’.[7] A stay in Paris improved his opinion of its citizens whom he found honest with the women ‘modest, for they have no Farding gales’.[8]
Mitchel’s publications are now included in the Signet Library’s online catalogue[9] and, where they have existing English Short Title Catalogue records, have been added to the ESTC. Ten more publications not yet in the ESTC database will be reported in due course.
Mitchel’s pamphlets are eccentric, lively, and often humorous. His confident mission to ‘give light’ to the world included addressing royalty, religious leaders, and his fellow citizens.
[1] William Roughead, ‘The Tincklarian Doctor: A Vagrom Pamphleteer’, in The Rebel Earl and Other Studies (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son, 1926), 89-127, at 91.
[2] William Mitchel, A wonderful sermon, preached by the Tinclarian Doctor, upon the nineteenth day of January 1734. and the sixty fourth year of his age, before hundreds of students of divinity, in the pulpit in the Divinity-Hall of the College of Edinburgh, which was approven of by them. My text is, Women who are possest with an ill Spirit.
[3] William Mitchel, A Part of the First Part of the Tinklars Testament, 21.
[4] William Mitchel, The Tincklarian Doctor Mitchel’ s Letter to Mr. Humphry Calchoun of Tillihewn, 2.
[5] William Mitchel, The Tincklarian Doctor Mitchel’s True Discription of the People of Glasgow, 1.
[6] William Mitchel, The History and Mistery of France and England, 2.
[7] William Mitchel, The History and Mistery of France and England, 3.
[8] William Mitchel, The History and Mistery of France and England, 3.
[9] https://sign.koha-ptfs.co.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=an:469.